10 Best New Orleans Restaurants for 2017

Every year since 2003, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune's restaurant critic Brett Anderson has selected the Top 10 Restaurants in New Orleans. That includes only restaurants that meet the expectations of fine dining in terms of ambition, food quality and service. Restaurants eligible for the 2016 Best New Restaurants list are not eligible for Top 10 Restaurants for 2017.

The restaurants in the Top 10 have been evaluated over the past year, with visits that are not announced in advance and are paid for by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. Anderson names these the 10 best restaurants in New Orleans for 2017. Every restaurant in the metro area that can reasonably expect to be considered for such a list — 30 or so restaurants, give or take, every year — is revisited at least once annually. Top contenders are visited more than once, almost all within three months of the Top 10's unveiling. They are listed in alphabetical order.

I cringed as the waiter talked us out of ordering the trout amandine. "I really think you'd enjoy the poisson Blangé," the waiter insisted. "The up-selling begins," I cynically thought. Then the food started to arrive: green tomatoes, tart and crunchy-fried, anchoring an elegant salad of shrimp and shaved fennel; seafood gumbo beyond reproach; a Berkshire pork porterhouse that married the palate of the rural South (creamed corn, roasted okra) to technique worthy of Escoffier (silky sauce of poached foie gras). The food reminded me what I'd temporarily forgotten about Brennan's. Not only has chef Slade Rushing's food restored the historic restaurant's reputation for culinary excellence, but the example of his enlightened, mature take on haute French-Creole is met by staff members who recognize their job is to enhance a diner's experience, not pad the check – a principle that too often went unobserved in the years Brennan's spent in decline. The Brennan's that co-owners Ralph Brennan and Terry White revived two years ago is something else now: an exuberant, sprawling pleasure palace that is dead serious about its culinary mission. That waiter was right about the poisson Blangé: It's exquisite.

Frank Brigtsen has been cooking inside a converted cottage in the Riverbend for half of his life on earth. He learned his craft from Paul Prudhomme, first at Commander's Palace and then K-Paul's, before opening Brigtsen's with his wife, Marna, 30 years ago. The restaurant they built feeds a yen for a specific down-home Southern hospitality, one that leaves you feeling like you received an extra scoop of ice cream. The gumbo is correct; the trout, catfish and oysters straight-out-the-boat; the sauces are the stuff of seasoned pots and gravy ladles, not squeeze bottles. Humble as it appears on the sensible dinnerware that carries it into lived-in dining rooms, Brigtsen's food is deep. His cooking testifies to the power of a pluralism that is local before it's global; that invites rural and urban cooking traditions into the same city kitchen; that benefits from the license to plate shrimp remoulade with guacamole and drape paneed rabbit cutlets in Creole mustard sauce. At Brigtsen's, the dinner table has always been common ground. Even in my foulest moods I can't imagine a future in which we can't all agree that Frank's mashed potatoes are delicious.

You know the old saw about New Orleans being a town where 500 chefs are cooking the same five recipes? Clancy's represents an era in local dining when the false stereotype held a kernel of truth. Granted, the Uptown restaurant's menu generally contains around 30 options, not counting specials (listen closely to those) or desserts (save room for lemon ice box pie and butterscotch budino). But the repertoire, which changes marginally with the seasons (book a table when soft-shells are happening), is informed by the belief that French-Creole cuisine evolved to a point where it should be insulated from further change. There was a time in the city's history — say, the 1980s, when Clancy's opened — when the preservationist impulse was frustratingly widespread. A night at Clancy's should make you look kindly upon this culinary past. The restaurant can claim to have authored classics — fried oysters with brie leap to mind — but the defining characteristic of chef Brian Larson's food is fidelity to its corner of a broader canon. The kitchen's cyclic labors yield more than just predictable results. All that drum-sautéing, yellowfin-searing, crab salad-plating and veal chop-browning are fuel for the remarkable vitality coursing through the old po-boy shop's dining rooms. Subject those proteins to Larson's textbook saucework, match them with the right Burgundy wine and a server who does her tuxedo uniform proud, and what you have is not a restaurant that is stuck in the past, but a restaurant with a singular voice.

Every day and every night, on every day of the year save Christmas and Fat Tuesday, the team at Commander's Palace enacts a series of mandates so ambitious it borders on insane: Treat every customer like Carnival royalty. Produce food that pleases the palate, challenges the imagination and channels the mythology of a consensus Important American Restaurant. Couple these things with Michelin star-level wine service and an atmosphere that splits the difference between a night at the opera and a night on the town. Now make these things happen inside an old plantation house large enough to accommodate mini-bus-size groups without belching. When the machinery that makes all this possible is running smoothly, as it usually is, your attention isn't captured by the machinery. It's fixed on the rum-braised pork belly, the gumbo du jour, the stuffed paneed rabbit, the bread pudding soufflé that has just absorbed its 12th spoonful of whiskey sauce. It's focused on the good time you're having and the important work of manufacturing a special occasion so you can return.

This summer, Kristen Essig joined Michael Stoltzfus as co-chef and partner at Coquette. It was not entirely shocking news; the chefs were already partners in life. Still, neither appeared in need of the other's professional help. Essig had developed a fine reputation for soulful, Frenchish cooking at Meauxbar. How would her influence impact Coquette, where Stoltzfus has been converting the stirrings of his imagination into a very personal iteration of modern American cooking for eight years now? To be honest, I don't know. What I do know is the meal I had at Coquette two months after the partnership was formed was every bit as delightful as the one I had last spring. Stoltzfus has never been afraid to use science lab techniques to bend ingredients to his will, pushing a lot of dishes toward the avant-garde, but Coquette's food has always been grounded in an appreciation for things as they are. The flights of fancy double as respectful tributes to familiar sources of inspiration, be it shrimp and grits, mozzarella-watermelon salad (money ingredient: purslane) or Southern fried chicken (that's hot paprika dancing on your tongue). There's reason to believe the arrival of Essig, whose cooking has always been more classically ingredient-driven, will only strengthen the creative enterprise — a delicious thought, when you consider how strong it is already.

Baked drum Provencal with mussels and olives at Herbsaint Restaurant in New Orleans. (NOLA.com l The Times-Picayune archive)

The steadiest local fine dining restaurant of the century so far opened at the start of the millennium, ushering the city into an era where diners would learn to be agnostic about plate size, among other things. Rebecca Wilcomb is the chef de cuisine of the kitchen where we first got to know Donald Link, before he went on to open Cochon, Cochon Butcher and Pêche Seafood Grill, and she has proven to be a skilled steward of the flagship. Herbsaint is an average-size restaurant with a considerable wingspan. The hodgepodge of influences – mainly Italian, French and Cajun-Creole – are so tightly united by sharp technique and exquisite taste you could believe kitchens have been churning out lamb lasagna and beet-yogurt salads in tandem with chicken-andouille gumbo and baked drum Provencal since the days of Buddy Bolden. In the grand tradition of great restaurants that point to the future on opening day and then stick around, the menu is both a work-in-progress and a testament to the wisdom of not fixing what ain't broke. This is to say the kitchen will neither abandon the staples we've come to expect nor stop trying to create new ones. Come open to the idea of getting turned onto new wine – Herbsaint's service rewards curiosity – and save room for the banana brown butter tart.

La Petite Grocery hits a striking number of sweet spots for a restaurant its size. It is a neighborhood place by virtue of its adjacency to so much residential foot traffic, its convivial bar and the reliable excellence of polished comfort food staples, most notably the cheeseburger. At the same time, it is a destination restaurant, a house of high refinement where certain menu signatures (turtle Bolognese, paneed rabbit, shellfish stew with collard greens) suggest a Parisian bistro on an enchanted bayou. And the numerous daily specials keep things unpredictable. It is both of New Orleans (blue crab beignets) and an outpost of the broader South (shrimp and grits), a safe space for Uptown blue bloods and pierced thrill-seekers alike. All of this speaks to the impressive range of chef-owner Justin Devillier, who with wife-partner Mia Freiberger-Devillier has made La Petite Grocery one of the defining culinary voices of post-Katrina New Orleans.

Pêche is hardly the only local restaurant serving an array of premium Gulf oysters and cool, inventive seafood salads at its raw bar. Its kitchen also is not the first to send whole cooked fish into its dining rooms for customers to poke and prod, nor is it alone in cooking as if the Gulf of Mexico were situated on the Pacific Rim. What's new is finding these elements seamlessly cohering in one New Orleans restaurant. Ryan Prewitt is Pêche's executive chef and part-owner, along with Stephen Stryjewski and Donald Link, and he runs with the notion that New Orleans food brings heat. The ground shrimp pasta is basically Cajun curry. The spice in both the shrimp bisque and catfish's chili broth is best treated with beer. Prewitt and Co. are using their buffed-and-shined version of a New Orleans seafood joint to challenge the context in which we see south Louisiana cuisine, with convincing, delicious results. Saltine crackers — Nabisco Premium, to be precise — are widely circulated, as are shrimp toasts crowned with house-made bread-and-butter pickles, and salsa verde, Pêche's antidote to meunière. The forthright flavors don't push the envelope so far that they threaten the nuance in the Gulf's delicacies. The crowds that first materialized at Pêche's 2013 opening have yet to abate. So yes, the dining room is loud. But the volume on the plate is just right.

The single most memorable dish I ate in New Orleans in 2016 was shrimp "étouffée" at Restaurant August. The shrimp came encased in shumai dumplings, over which a waiter poured what he called "ginger roux." The liquid was intoxicating, like a dark gumbo's broth weaponized in southeast Asia. It, of course, wasn't that much like an étouffée, just like the roasted blackfish "courtbouillon" wasn't much like a fish stew and the stuffed crab isn't like anything you'll find at your neighborhood seafood joint. Executive chef Todd Pulsinelli, like all of the Restaurant August chefs before him, including founder John Besh, is inspired by traditional southeast Louisiana cooking, not bound to it. His mission is to maintain the status of one of the last great white-glove-service restaurants to open in New Orleans before the taste for such things petered out. Fifteen years later, August is still your best bet for contemporary New Orleans food in the kind of hushed environs that signaled culinary excellence in Western culture for at least a century, before hamburgers got expensive. While the technique slipped a bit as my last dinner progressed from small-plate courses to large, all of the food was alive with possibility, and the staff was suave in its delivery. You're missing an opportunity to have an even better evening if you don't solicit sommelier Erin White's sage, no-nonsense wine advice. Same can be said if you don't save room for pastry chef Patricia Morton's edgy, elegant desserts.

Hummus with curried fried cauliflower and caramelized onions at Shaya, in New Orleans. (Photo by David Grunfeld, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)

No New Orleans restaurant in recent memory has accrued as much national acclaim as quickly as Shaya. The excitement surrounding its 2014 opening crested last spring, when the James Beard Foundation named Shaya the country's best new restaurant. None of this is material to the joy of eating chef Alon Shaya's effervescent interpretations of his native Israeli cuisine. Anyone who has passed torn pieces of Shaya's hot-from-the-oven pita bread through one of his wide assortment of dips knows that calling this chic Uptown canteen a "hummus house" is neither hyperbole nor insult. At its root, Shaya's cooking is both that basic and that good. Shaya's national reputation suggests there is cross-state consensus on these facts. My local view is that this amounts to a substantive accomplishment. Forking into Shaya's melting, slow-cooked lamb and spice-stained carrots, you'll know it's only a matter of time before things like whipped feta and chermoula become local restaurant staples. It's not every day a restaurant specializing in Middle Eastern food enters the upper echelon of New Orleans' must-visit restaurants. That it did so in no time flat is our most recent best example of excellent food and service opening closed minds.